“I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.” This is what Charles Krauthammer said when asked why he left the field of practicing psychiatry to become a political administrator and later a columnist and public intellectual.
The medical field must be frustrating in many ways for doctors. The broader population may envy them for making a lot of money, but dealing with recalcitrant patients can be very difficult. How can they help a patient who won’t tell them the truth?
We think of psychiatrists’ offices as places where difficult truths are told, and I think for the most part they are, but truth to me is an ideal. We should strive for it but not really expect to get it.